Tag: New York stories

Book Review: Confessions by Catherine Airey – a compelling story of three generations of Irish women, their secrets and their choices

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

I couldn’t stop reading this accomplished debut novel. Confessions gets off to a dramatic beginning – New York, September 2001, the day the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre were attacked. And that’s where teenage Cora’s father works. There’s her slow realisation that he won’t be coming home. Help comes from an unexpected quarter – an Aunt Roísín she didn’t know she had, and it’s away to Ireland and a new life.

Rather than following Cora’s fresh start in Ireland, the story switches back to describe two sisters growing up and struggling with the sudden loss of their father. Their mother takes to her bed and the sisters, Maire and Roísín, do their best. Maire is a brilliant artist but has mental health issues. Fortunately there’s Michael who adores her and is like a brother to Roísín. We’re also with Maire when she earns a scholarship to New York and her struggles to fit in with a narrative shift told interestingly in the second person.

Almost like a character in itself is the big old mansion outside the village, once a stately home, that has become a refuge for women seeking an alternative lifestyle. Known as The Screamers, it offers a new chance first to Maire, and later the home for Roísín and the returning young Cora. It is where Cora’s daughter, Lyca, digs into the past and finds some long buried secrets.

On the walk home from midnight mass you go inside a phone box. Shutting yourself in reminds you of being inside the confessional booth back home. Your first confession, when you wanted to tell Father Peter about Jesus winking at you from the cross over the altar. Your mother had told you that this was a false image, that you were imaging things. But it didn’t feel fair to count this as a sin when you weren’t the one doing the winking. Instead, said you sometimes wished your sister was dead. This seemed to satisfy the priest, who sent you off to pray the rosary.

In Confessions we have the repeated themes of girls growing up without a father, teen pregnancies, too much freedom or too much restraint. These young women are all smart enough to do well in a world that accepts them for who they are, but it’s going to take more recent generations – Cora, and then Lyca – for that to happen, and a more modern Ireland. But it’s the long buried secrets that keep the reader on their toes to the end. How will they disturb the fragile memories Cora in particular has of her parents?

And the writing is wonderful, finely tuned to each character and allowing them to tell their story, vivid and at times very intense. The setting of New York in particular is an interesting highlight – it comes through as a walker’s city, shown from the ground up, as well as a place of surprising vistas when seen from a high-rise building. The contrast with a small Irish town couldn’t be more stark – the closed-in feel of the early interiors, then Screamers with its warren of rooms.

This is a well put-together story, the threads of the different characters carefully woven in and, at the same time, written from the heart. I was glad to receive this advance reader copy thanks to Netgalley, in return for an honest review. Confessions is due for release late January and a four-and-a-half star read from me.

Book Review: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles – a story of love, friendship and making the right connections in 1930s New York

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

If I had a list of authors who can make a laundry list sound interesting, Amor Towles would surely be near the top of it. (If anyone has already curated a list like that, I’d love to see it – just saying.) Rules of Civility is Towles’s first novel and the writing is just as good as the later books that have made his name: A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway. There’s the same nuanced prose, the characters that seem to breathe on the page, the originality of the storyline.

In this novel we’re in New York City, mostly over a year that begins on New Year’s Eve 1937. Twenty-somethings Katherine Kontent and her roommate, Eve Ross, are out to celebrate, finding themselves in a lacklustre nightclub, where complicated jazz solos make it kind of interesting. Here they stumble upon Tinker Grey, a slightly older, impeccably dressed and very handsome young man.

The three strike up a friendship that pulls them all in different directions. Both girls are drawn to Tinker, but he’s just so enigmatic, it’s hard to tell if either can win his heart. In the meantime they just hang out together, enjoying the vibe they create as a small group of friends. An accident pushes a guilt-ridden Tinker towards Eve, and Katherine shrugs off her disappointment and gets on with life.

It is Katherine’s voice who narrates the story and we follow her progress from a typing pool, to a publishing house and then the competitive world of a society magazine. She’s sharp, witty and hard working, but then she needs to be – she’s rubbing shoulders with an Ivy League-educated elite, while she herself is from fairly humble beginnings. Everything she has she’s had to earn herself. In the background Tinker and Eve waft in and out of her life, while other relationships come and go.

The book is peopled with lively, colourful New Yorkers – the drinking buddies Katherine makes through the girls she works with; well-heeled and influential friends and acquaintances of Tinker’s; the raw, working class guys who hang out with Tinker’s artist brother. Katherine has a gift for fitting in and adding to whichever group she meets and in this way is the perfect narrator.

In front of the boardinghouse Tinker was standing beside a Mercedes coupé as silver as mercury. If all the girls at Mrs. Martingale’s saved a year’s pay, we couldn’t have afforded one.
Fran Pacelli, the five-foot-nine City College dropout from North Jersey who lived down the hall, whistled like a hard hat appreciating the hem of a skirt. Eve and I went down the steps.
Tinker was obviously in a good mood. He gave Eve a kiss on the cheek and a You look terrific. When he turned to me, he smiled and gave my hand a squeeze. He didn’t offer me the kiss or the compliment, but Eve was watching and she could tell that she was the one who’d been short-changed.

A lot happens in just one year, and you can’t help thinking that for many in 1938, times were tough. But not among the glittering social set of New York. The story builds to some surprising revelations, particularly about Tinker but also about others who pass through Katherine’s orbit, the main action of the story bookended by her visit to a photographic exhibition decades later and a kind of catch-up with what has happened in the meantime.

It all makes for a satisfying read: the brilliantly rendered view of 1930s New York, the story of a woman determined to make her own way, the glorious writing. Rules of Civility is just as good as the other books by Amor Towles, and I look forward to his collection of short stories, Table for Two, as well as whatever else he’s got in the pipeline. I know they’ll all be five-star reads, just like this one.

Book Review: Good Riddance by Elinor Lipman – a witty New York comedy full of the unexpected

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

I’m often drawn to these sorts of New York comedies. I like the smart and snappy dialogue, the invigorating big city atmosphere – the apartments and the quirky characters who are always eating out or talking about eating out. I really enjoyed Elinor Lipman’s On Turpentine Lane, so was keen to snap this one up too. Both novels showcase this author as a writer of very original storylines.

In Good Riddance, the story follows Daphne Maritch, studying to be a chocolatier after a failed marriage and a recent move to a new apartment. It’s not long since her mother died, bequeathing Daphne, among other things, a 1968 Pickering High School yearbook. June Maritch was just a few years older than her students that year and had attended all the class of ’68 reunions, as well as annotating her yearbook with snarky comments about her former pupils.

Daphne doesn’t see any reason to keep the yearbook, and consigns it to the dumpster, where it is discovered by her neighbour, a budding documentary film maker. Geneva Wisenkorn sees all kinds of potential from interviewing the old classmates, showing them the yearbook and speculating about their teacher.

Suddenly Daphne rethinks her hasty ditching of the evidence. She doesn’t want her mother seen in a poor light and doesn’t trust her neighbour not to make her family look ridiculous. Her father was for many years principal at Pickering after all. Throw in a politician with a scandalous secret that also affects Daphne and suddenly she’s feels desperate to shut down the doco and reclaim the yearbook.

There’s a romantic twist to the story in the form of Jeremy, the young actor across the hall, who becomes Daphne’s co-conspirator. And things are complicated by Daphne’s father moving to New York. He plans to see a bit of life in the city he’s always dreamt of. When her dad takes on a dog-walking job, he has a chance to meet all kinds of women.

Lipman throws in loads of fun situations, including Daphne’s tagging along with Geneva to a reunion, a wedding, a funeral and a dramatic situation requiring Daphne to administer first aid. There’s a load of humorous dialogue and the characters butt heads and wind each other up spectacularly. It’s a fun read all round, but I have to say Daphne isn’t for me a particularly appealing character. She can be rather shouty and shrill. Maybe she needs more chocolate.

But on the whole, Good Riddance is an amusing read and Lipman’s writing crackles on the page. I whizzed through the book and will certainly read more by this author. Good Riddance is a three star read from me.

Book Review: It All Comes Down to This by Therese Anne Fowler – a compelling sisterly drama

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

Stories about sisters seem to pop up in all kinds of literature. They’re in those fairy stories I loved as a kid (Cinderella, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, Snow White and Rose Red), several Jane Austen novels, to say nothing of King Lear which we read in high school. What is it that we like about sister stories so much? Is it because you get to see a family from several different angles? Whatever the reason, I absolutely devoured It All Comes Down to This.

The book starts out in New York – another plus for me – where Marti Geller is getting her affairs in order. She has only a couple of weeks to live and is remarkably calm about it; the hospice people are wonderful. She has written in her will that the family cottage in Maine is to be sold and the proceeds divided among her three daughters. This creates a mixture of responses from the sisters, particularly as she has chosen her son-in-law as her executor.

Beck is appalled at the idea of the sale. The cottage has been their vacation home for decades, even if no one’s been there in a while. Her sisters could use the money, but Beck is looking for a bolt-hole. With her children grown-up she wants to finally write that novel. She’s an accomplished journalist, but the novel has been in the back of her mind for years. It doesn’t help that her husband Paul is an editor for a publishing company that has nurtured award winning novelists. Having him peering over her shoulder just stifles any creative juices. Secretly, Beck wonders if Paul might be gay.

Middle sister Claire is recently divorced, having admitted to her husband after too many drinks at a party, that he wasn’t the love of her life. She still carries a torch for someone else. As a girl, Claire struggled to compete with assertive Beck or pretty younger sister Sophie, the family darling, so she worked hard at school. Now Clare’s a paediatric heart surgeon, still with a huge student loan to pay off. The divorce has been another financial burden and she’s got a young son to think of. Selling the cottage in Maine would be a godsend.

While her older sisters married early and settled into family life, Sophie is single at thirty-six and trying to live the dream, or at least what her Instagram followers think is the dream. She works for an art gallery in New York, using her bubbly personality to seal deals with up and coming artists and their buyers. This involves travel and looking the part and being at all the right parties. She has maxed out all her credit cards and lives out of two suitcases, house-sitting to put a roof over her head, while everyone thinks she has a flat of her own which she sublets. Sophie could definitely use a hefty cash injection.

The narrative cycles between these three women as well as Paul, who has a burning secret of his own and C J Reynolds the cottage’s prospective buyer. C J is interesting in that he’s just served a term in prison for shooting at his father. Another character with family baggage. He settles into a friend’s lavish home on Maine with the idea of buying in the area and is surprised to have to share the house with two other unusual house guests: an elderly patrician woman and her newly orphaned grandson. This creates some wonderful scenes as the three learn to get along with each other.

The story burbles along between all of the above characters and while they are likeable enough, the author doesn’t shirk from showing us their faults and foibles. The story is paced nicely as Beck does her darnedest to hang on to the cottage and the lengths she will go to. Claire’s story is more of an emotional one while Sophie gets in a tighter and tighter spot as her financial house of cards looks set to crumble.

So, as I said, I simply plowed through the book, thoroughly entertained and curious about how it would work out for all five characters. But to tell the truth the ending fell a little flat for me. Was it a bit too fanciful, a bit rushed? Or was it that when it came down to it, I found the sisters just a bit foolish, annoyingly so even, and not quite likeable enough. So this one’s a three and a half out of five from me. I’ll still hunt out more books by this author though.

Book Review: Alternate Side by Anna Quindlen

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

There is something about a New York novel – and Alternate Side could be the quintessential New York novel – that always seems to appeal. Maybe it’s because New York is one of those cities that people dream of calling home (like Paris or London, for that matter) – the culture, the food, the parties the opportunities…

And so it is for Nora Nolan, who turns up in New York after college, and here meets Charlie. Alternate Side is partly the story of their marriage, and their finest achievements as a couple – their twins, Rachel and Oliver. And then there’s their house. The Nolans live on a quiet block of infinitely expensive Victorian houses, with a dead-end which makes it even more of an enclave.

They attend parties and barbecues with their neighbours, watch each other’s children grow up, use the same handyman: Puerto Rican Ricky from the Bronx. They all have nannies and housekeepers – for the Nolans, it’s Charity from Jamaica. And to give Nora credit, she does sometimes feel conflicted that all the people she knows have immigrant hired help, black or hispanic, who come from poor neighbourhoods.

Their children, their dogs, and housing prices: the holy trinity of conversation for New Yorkers of a certain sort. For the men, there were also golf courses and wine lists to be discussed; for the women, dermatologists.”

The story begins with Charlie beaming with glee, having finally been offered a space in the street’s only parking lot – an empty section which once contained a house and now has room for a select half dozen cars. As you can imagine, these spaces are highly sought after. When a violent incident occurs, involving Ricky and one of the Nolans’ more insufferable neighbours, things are never quite the same for anybody. Suddenly the gaps between the haves and the have-nots are obvious to all, not just Nora, as issues of racism and entitlement in connection with the block make the news.

Alternate Side is about keeping up appearances, as well as that old adage, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it. Everything seems to fall into Nora’s lap – her job setting up a jewellery museum (only in New York, right?) is one of a string of interesting work opportunities that always seem to come her way. Her marriage: Charlie appeared just at the right time when Nora was suffering from a broken heart. What is it Nora really wants? That is the question.

“People go through life thinking they’re making decisions, when they’re really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all.”

The story though is very much in the telling. Anna Quindlen writes with both wit and wisdom and I found myself chuckling at the snappy dialogue and Nora’s wry outlook, her interactions with Phil, the panhandler who takes up space on the path outside the jewellery museum, the obnoxious notes distributed by neighbour George about rules on use of the parking lot. There is so much to enjoy here as well as a story to make you think – and all set in New York. I loved it. A four and a half out of five from me.